Less than a fortnight after Jeannie came to see the point of silence, the two hijacked jets ploughed into the World Trade Center. After her father recovered from the surprise and the terror – there was the shame. He ought to have seen it coming. He ought to have warned people. He understood this part of the world. Now, as never before, it was his job to explain. So he offered his services. Not for money, not for glory. Just to do the right thing. But (as he ought to have foreseen) no one in Washington took the bait.
As September wore on and Bush’s war on terror gained momentum, as pundits who had never ventured beyond Washington and London began to talk in broad and sweeping terms about the East, the West and the peril that was Islam, he pressed his case with ever greater insistence, to no avail. He was coming from the wrong direction, he was on the wrong side of the divide. His words made no sense because no one – or almost no one – wished to make sense of them.
Then an opportunity came his way. In early October, Haluk invited him to speak on Radio Enlightenment to discuss and analyse the war on terror, the crisis in intelligence and what William Wakefield himself called ‘the parallel crisis in White House stupidity’. He spoke well, in Turkish, and before long, his caustic, damning but strangely cheerful reports had become a staple.
In November of the same year, when a political crisis caused a panic that caused Turkey’s currency to halve in value overnight, he did an item for the BBC World Service, and before long, he was talking down ISDN lines to radio stations all over the world whenever there was a Turkish bomb or earthquake or political scandal big enough to warrant international interest.
In November 2002, when an electorate tired of corruption voted out most of the political establishment, and voted in a new pro-market, pre-European Islamist AK Party, William Wakefield made his first appearance on CNN.
He made his last in the aftermath of the four al-Qaeda-linked bombs that shattered the city centre the following year. His intemperate remarks about the world being a more dangerous place now Bush had set out to make it safer may have lost him favour at CNN but won him admirers elsewhere. The more the media used him, the more outrageous and newsworthy he became.
When asked on Turkish networks to speak about his own country, he was gleefully rude – almost proud to be rude. If anyone called him to task on it, he said, ‘This is how I express my patriotism.’
When asked on American, Australian or European networks to speak about Turkey, he was measured even when the questions exasperated him. ‘Never miss a chance for a history lesson,’ he’d say. ‘Not even if you’re writing in the sand.’ He would explain ‘this country’ to ‘those people’ if it was the last thing he did. ‘You can make that my epitaph,’ he’d say. If I could, I would.
Between September 2001 and April 2005 Sinan made one stand-alone documentary and two series. They were overtly political (because William Wakefield had been stoking his fires? Or because he, too, had been swept into the zeitgeist?) and they established him on the world stage. He was now getting all his funding from Europe – he could no longer depend on Haluk’s cultural foundation – its budget having been slashed after the currency crisis. So there were questions in the press about who exactly was financing his work. In the absence of names, they were dubbed ‘enemies of Turkey’.
He refused to be intimidated.
The first series he put out during this period was a rather loose-knit affair entitled Turkey: an Interim Report. It began with the forced relocation of several Kurdish villages to make way for a dam, and went on to look at corrupt developers in Antalya and the underside of humanitarian aid to earthquake victims. The last segment, about the hunger strikers then dying in large numbers in prisons, was critical not just of state authorities but of the Stalinist groups to which they belonged. This did not stop a leading columnist from charging him with insulting the state – a prisonable offence.
So in Torture without Marks he left behind the paradoxes of the militant left to focus on state-sponsored violence. Although he let his subjects tell their stories, he filmed them in their homes, returning or failing to return, to ordinary life. Some lived in Hisar Üstü, in the hills just above my parents’ house. The same families featured in his second series, which he filmed on and off between 2001 and 2003. The War became a series by accident. His original aim had been to film the ‘war’ between the Alevi Muslims on one side of Hisar Üstü and the Sunni Muslims on the other. The Alevi women did not cover their heads while their Sunni neighbours did; when the Alevi women had a political point to make they strolled through the Sunni neighbourhood bareheaded.
On September 11th 2001, he happened to be sitting in a coffeehouse wedged between those two neighbourhoods when he glanced up at the television to see a tower collapsing. He had the presence of mind to film the commotion that followed. He went back in the run-up to the war in Afghanistan, during the invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003, and in the aftermath of the Al-Qaeda-linked bombs in Istanbul in November of the same year. They seem to have fallen off the list we get with each new terrorist atrocity, so perhaps I should remind you that there were four massive suicide bombs that ripped through two synagogues, the British Consulate, and the headquarters of the HSBC. Not all responses to these events were informed or temperate, but no two were alike: you could never predict who would say what, or how their views might change.
The film did well in Europe, and perhaps because it was so timely and cut through the tyrannies of East-West rhetoric to show ordinary Muslims in all their variety, it was a sensation in the US. Even as he was making the last film in the series, the first three were being shown on campuses all over the country.
In January 2005, an agent called from New York suggesting Sinan take the final film on a nationwide tour. He flew in to convince him personally, pumping Sinan full of praise. Whenever Sinan alluded to some episode in his past, the agent would say, ‘You know, there might just be a film in that.’ Did he put the idea into Sinan’s head? Or had William Wakefield already done so?
It was not long after the agent’s visit that Sinan began the project that was to be his undoing.
This was how he sold it: the world had changed and so had the purported enemy – it was no longer Communism we were meant to fear. It was Islam. But the cloud had a silver lining. Now that Communism was no longer a menace, at last it was safe to talk about what we’d all been through in the name of the Free World. To see how strange this little chapter of history had been.
But here was the strangest thing. For all the changes we had seen – the world felt more like 1970 with every passing day. The war in Iraq, and the war against the war. The insurgents. The bombs. The surges of anti-American sentiment, the terrorists and counter terrorists. The isms. The atrocities. The invisible threat. The paranoia. The spies. All too often – the same spies.
He finished My Cold War in the winter of 2005. He took it on the festival circuit that spring, picking up an honourable mention here and there and one small prize. On July 6th 2005 he did a screening at the Frontline Club in London. One of the people in the audience was Jordan Frick.
He kept quiet at the question and answer session, and either Sinan failed to recognise him or he chose not to do so.
The same thing happened, or rather, failed to happen, on the plane they both boarded the next morning.